Name: Albert Stephen Graf
Branch/Rank: United States Marine Corps/O2
Unit: VMFA 542 MAG 11
Date of Birth: 08 September 1944
Home City of Record: BOGOTA NJ
Date of Loss: 29 August 1969
Country of Loss: South Vietnam
Loss Coordinates: 154212 North 1081112 East
Status (in 1973): Killed In Action/Body Not Recovered
Category: 3
Aircraft/Vehicle/Ground: F4B #153041
Missions:
Other Personnel in Incident:
Refno: 1486
Source: Compiled by P.O.W. NETWORK from one or more of the following: raw
data from U.S. Government agency sources, correspondence with POW/MIA
families, published sources, interviews and CACCF = Combined Action
Combat Casualty File. Updated 2010 with information from Elaine Zimmer Davis.
REMARKS:
CACCF/CRASH/AIRCREW/QUANG NAM
No further information available at this time.

MIA UPDATE

CAPT JERRY
ZIMMER, USMC

1ST
LT AL GRAF, USMC

SEPTEMBER,
2010

Many thanks to POW Network and others who have
continued to keep our Vietnam POWs and MIAs in the forefront and to
feature bios of people like my husband, Capt Jerry Zimmer, and 1st
Lt Al Graf, both of whom are MIAs. Here is the latest news on the
status of their case, #1486. I have tried to be brief and accurate,
but this is a complex story with a lot of twists and turns along the
way. Thank you for your interest!

Background: 1969

My first husband, Capt Jerry A Zimmer, USMC,
and 1st Lt Al Graf, USMC, were killed in Vietnam on
August 29, 1969, when their F4 was shot down over the Que Son
Mountains, approximately 20 miles south of Da Nang Air Base where
they were attached to VMFA 542, an F4B squadron. My husband was the
pilot, and Al was his Radar Intercept Officer (RIO). Due to the
wartime situation and heavy armament on their aircraft, no remains
were recovered, and I was told by Marine Corps officials—including
Jerry’s Commanding Officer--not to expect any changes in that
assessment in the future. The aircraft was armed with napalm, 500
lb Snake-eye bombs and full fuel, so I didn’t contest their
findings. Jerry and Al were clearing a landing zone for a Recon
insert, a seemingly routine mission, when the plane was hit during
its first bombing run, by 50 Cals hidden in the mountainside. Soon
after, the 1st Force Recon team (Sailfish), led by 2nd
Lt. Wayne Rollings, USMC, (now Maj Gen Rollings, ret) hiked to the
area and verified that there were no survivors.

I would learn much later that Jerry and Al were
two of only 130 Marines listed as KIA/BNR, among the 14,840 Marines
killed in the Vietnam War. When I read those statistics, my heart
broke all over again, but I knew it was the cruelty of war. Little
did I know that other revelations would eventually surface—four
decades after Jerry’s and Al’s deaths!

JPAC Excavates

What a difference 41 years can make. After
countless months of research, visits to Vietnam and email traffic
with hundreds of Marines, friends and officials, our family managed
to convince the Joint Prisoners of War, Missing in Action Accounting
Command (JPAC)—the group that searches for our MIAs in former
battlefields throughout the world—of inaccuracies recorded under its
predecessor, the Joint Task Force-Full Accounting (JTF-FA), who was
investigating all known sites in the early nineties, included
Jerry’s and Al’s. Shortly after, JTF-FA placed Jerry’s and Al’s case
in the “No Further Pursuit” category, where it remained for nearly
two decades, until 1st Sgt Bob Burke, USMC, ret—a guide for
Battlefield Tours, took Al’s widow and others to what everyone
believed was Al’s crash site. Once in country, however, observing
differences in the terrain, Bob began to question the coordinates,
recorded on the U.S. military’s Vietnam 1:50,000 Hiep Duc map. Upon
returning to the states, Bob called my husband, Capt Ron Davis,
USMC, ret—a former Huey gunship pilot who I married after Jerry’s
death, setting in motion an enormous effort that would lead us to
believe that remains might be available, after all.

Ron, a former Special Agent with the FBI, set
up an email distribution list with hundreds of fellow Marines,
friends and experts around the country to learn everything he could
about the event that ended Jerry’s and Al’s lives 40 years earlier.
He talked on the phone to other pilots who were in the air with our
guys and those on the ground. Ron spent nights and weekends
researching, trying to determine the exact location of the site.
The names of people who helped would fill an entire page, but we
couldn’t have done it without them—nor could we have done it without
JPAC!

The reason that Jerry’s and Al’s site received
the lowest chance of ever being excavated was that investigators in
the early nineties were misdirected by witnesses to a location, just
short of the crash’s impact zone. However, as we continued
to learn more about the challenges that faced the JTF-FA in those
early years, it was easy to understand how that oversight happened.
At the time, they were investigating/reviewing hundreds of
cases—over a thousand—and doing their best to cover a lot of
territory in a hostile environment. During those early days,
shortly after the normalization of relations between the U.S. and
Vietnam, MIA investigators were not received with open arms by many
of the Vietnamese people. Hostilities were apparent, and no doubt
made investigative efforts even more difficult. Things have changes
immensely in the last two decades but it was slow going in the first
two.

After Ron had compiled all the information that
he’d gathered, including high resolution images of parts that Lt Col
Gene Mares, USMC, ret, and I had found on a trip to Vietnam, he
created a detailed PowerPoint presentation, petitioning JPAC to
reactivate Jerry’s and Al’s case. In turn, JPAC followed up with a
site investigation, concurring with our findings. They placed
Jerry’s and Al’s case on the excavation waiting list until August
2010. The good thing about our guys’ crash site was its location,
which is accessible by foot—a critical factor , because JPAC
recovery teams in Vietnam currently cannot be transported to sites
by Vietnamese helicopters.

Although we were disappointed that no human
remains were found, the JPAC recovery team, dispensed from Hawaii,
worked its heart out. JPAC left the site open, pending recovery of
remains, so that a team can return in the future to conduct another
excavation. Note: Prior to the excavation, we understood that the
site likely would require more than one excavation, so while we were
saddened that no remains turned up, we weren’t caught off guard.
Jet crashes are among the toughest to excavate, because the debris
fields are huge and finding the remains of two people typically
requires more than one excavation. In fact, we were told that the
average is two excavations per site. And although the scope of the
debris field is a problem, it is not the only concern. A big issue
is that time is running out in Vietnam—faster than in other wartime
locations where our MIAs still exist. Unfortunately, remains are
disappearing rapidly in Vietnam, due to acidic soil and erosion that
plagues most of the country—except the sandy locations, close to
beach areas, which are not representative of most remaining MIA
cases.

Elaine Zimmer Davis is the widow of Capt Zimmer
and a long-time writer/editor, who has stayed connected with people
interested in the recent events surrounding Jerry’s and Al’s case
with her blog:
www.bringingjerryhome.com.